As a married couple, it is possible to save on insurance expenses if you and your spouse know what to do. However, it must start with answering the question: should that you combine your individual car insurance policies? Before making the decision, it is important to understand how insurance policy merges work and their effects to your fees and benefits.
You Can Have More Preference for Insurance
One of the great things about combining auto insurances is that the insurance underwriters would usually give more preference to married couples (this includes lower rates) because they believe that married individuals have less accidents than single people. Although this may seem prejudice to single individuals, this is backed up by a 2004 study by the National Institutes of Health stating that single people are two times more likely to get into an accident than a married person.
You Get to Combine Records
When you get married, you and your spouse are considered one combined entity already under the law. If you and your spouse combine your auto insurance policies, both your driving records will be taken into a single account. If you have a lot of ticket records or accidents and your spouse doesn’t have many, then the insurers will most likely average you and your spouse’s records to create rates. If both of you have a number of tickets and accidents, then you’ll have really high rates. If one of you doesn’t have any records but the other does, then you may see your rates go up a bit. This is a double-edged sword depending on what you and your spouse’s long term marriage financial plan is.
You Get Some Discounts
Once you get married and you and your spouse each have one car, you can combine the cars into one insurance policy and get a discount. This discount is known as a multi-car family discount and is offered by a lot of insurers. The more cars your family has, the higher the discount you’ll be able to get since you’ll be getting your insurance policies “in bulk”. Bulk buying always does lead to higher discount rates. This is one of the biggest benefits that you can get from combining your policy with your spouse’s.
Conclusion
Those are some of the effects of combining insurance policies. Although it may seem really advantageous to combine policies, it will really depend on the driving records of each person. You can get more preference from the insurers and get better rates but that will depend on the individual driving records each spouse. As for the discounts, you’ll always get discounts from having more cars in your policy. However, you must first plan with your spouse on which is the better move for you and your spouse’s situation. You may want to consult experts for advice before doing this.
Companies like Comparaencasa can be able to help you with your insurance policies and to help you better understand how they work.
